Driven by Revenge
One of the very few things a person is driven to villainy to is revenge. When a villain feels wronged by someone or something, they wish and even seek to get their own kind of justice by getting back at the very things they believed had wronged them. Villains who seek vengeance usually plan to get it by killing the hero or the hero's loved ones or causing great destruction to not only the hero, but for others as well. There are many ways that can cause a villain to seek retribution against the hero or any other enemy. Villains often seek revenge for several reasons: *Being defeated previously. *Being humiliated or disgraced. *Their backstory. *Feeling wronged. Sometimes, the person seeking revenge is doing out of a subconscious sense of guilt and responsibility, or to cover up some other emotion like a survivor's guilt (which often explains any death seeking behavior). Sometimes they have placed revenge before reason. Bringing this out into the open can produce an interesting effect. The character often finds that completing the revenge will leave his life feeling flat and empty. Revenge was never satisfactory, or now that it is over, he does not know what to do with himself. Sometimes, during the course of the pursuit of revenge, the avenger becomes just as bad as, if not worse than, the one who committed the initial awful deed to begin with. And sometimes, revenge does not end with the person who committed the crime — other people connected to the original villain may well decide to pursue vengeance against the original avenger, which may very well lead to a cycle of revenge. Since revenge is one of the darker character motivations, villains, being a rather unforgiving lot, will often choose to take vengeance on those who have, in their eyes, wronged them, even if the "wrong" in question was something legitimately justified, such as stopping a villain's original evil plan and putting him behind bars or stopping an associate of his, which resulted in the associate's death. Villains in general are more likely to engage in disproportionate retribution than many heroes, and never usually care about what happens to innocents that get swept up in the mess — some such villains deliberately target innocents who are connected to the person they want revenge on, just to make the person suffer all the more. Others target anyone who has anything to do with a certain organization responsible for what led them on this rampage, regardless of whether or not those people were actually involved in the crime in question, or take it out on the descendants of those who wronged them to start with. Others will broaden their vendetta to cover more and more people until the vendetta essentially covers all of humanity. This can be tempered, or even overridden, if the character keeps it up; killing the man who killed your father can be noble if he continues to slaughter people wherever he goes, and your revenge can be viewed as the icing on the cake. Villains can often be seen drawing on the power of hatred in order to get their revenge as well. On the other hand, revenge can also appear lighter in shade. If the provocation was extreme, and still more if the character is reacting quickly to circumstance, without time to think — as in the person strikes back — the effect can be mostly sympathetic. It can also be softened by the character's being partly motivated by the knowledge that the villain will go on committing such crime, and by taking care to ensure that only the guilty suffer, and suffer no more than they deserve. Quotes }} Category:About Villains Category:Conflicts Category:Villainous Events